Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look

Abstract

The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, explain how social media can lead to selective exposure and can be used as a disguise for those in power to disseminate biased information. To investigate this debate empirically, we evaluate Twitter as a public sphere using four metrics: equality, diversity, reciprocity and quality. Using these measurements, we analyze the communication patterns between individuals of different hierarchical levels and ideologies. We do this within the context of three diverse conflicts: Israel-Palestine, US Democrats-Republicans, and FC Barcelona-Real Madrid. In all cases, we collect data around a central pair of Twitter accounts representing the two main parties. Our results show in a quantitative manner that Twitter is not an ideal public sphere for democratic conversations and that hierarchical effects are part of the reason why it is not.Keywords: public sphere, social stratification, conflict, political communication, twitter IntroductionWith the rapid growth of Twitter, it has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for online communication. Besides using it for relationship formation and maintenance, many people also regularly engage in discussions about controversial issues [1]. On one hand, this increasing adoption of Twitter for online deliberation inevitably creates a perfect environment for open and unrestricted conversations. On the other hand, individuals on Twitter tend to associate more with like-minded others and to receive information selectively. This leads the cyber-pessimist to emphasize the vital role of opinion leaders in shaping others' perceptions during a conflict and to foresee the online environment as a disguise for those in higher social hierarchy to disseminate information. In order to empirically understand whether Twitter creates a public sphere for democratic debates we ask questions like: How do people on different sides of ideological trenches engage with each other on Twitter? How much does social stratification matter in this process? And how universal are such patterns across different types of polarized conflicts?For our study, we choose three conflicts of very different nature: the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Democrat-Republication political polarization, and the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid football rivalry. Our analysis is guided by four assessment metrics for the democratic public sphere introduced by [2], namely, (i) equality, (ii) diversity, (iii) reciprocity, and (iv) quality. We find that in general Twitter is not an idealized space for democratic, rational cross-ideological debate, as individuals from the bottom social hierarchy not only interact less but also provide lower quality comments in inter-ideological communication. We believe our results advance the understanding of opportunities and limitations provi...

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“…While some have envisioned increased democratization with users from different political ideologies engaging with each other (Semaan 1 3 et al 2014), others warned that use of social media platforms could encourage selective exposure by reinforcing users' existing biases (Liu and Weber 2014).…”

“…These results have been reinforced by studies showing that not only are social media users more willing to communicate with other like-minded users (Liu and Weber 2014;Smith et al 2013), they are also unable to engage in meaningful discussions with users with different beliefs than their own (Yardi and Boyd 2010). Therefore, political polarization on social media platforms has been an active area of research, with multiple different studies analyzing the behaviors of ideologically different groups of users.…”

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“…1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 There is a controversial debate between "optimistic" and "pessimistic" perspectives on the relation between the public sphere and Twitter that focuses on the democratizing role of social media and on participation and polarization. This "microblogging" platform must also be understood as a place of online conflict with considerable potential to influence offline conflicts (Liu and Weber, 2014); a very recent example is the Trump campaign and its various supporting groups during the last US presidential elections. In crisis contexts, online media, and social media networking sites like Twitter are popular tools for protestors to network and organise political activities; they play an important role in facilitating political mobilisation towards change (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013), which indicates their political potential for spreading awareness and information on e.g.…”

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